358 ORIGIN OF CULTIVATED PLANTS. 



cultivation, but it does not persist indefinitely.* Tlie 

 plant which the inhabitants call wild wheat, Frumentu 

 sarvaggiu, which covers uncultivated ground, is jEgilops 

 ovata, according to Inzenga.^ 



A zealous collector, Balansa, believed that he had 

 found wheat growing on Mount Sipylus, in Asia Minor, 

 under circumstances in which it was impossible not to 

 believe it wild;^ but the plant he brought back is a 

 spelt, Triticum monococcum, according to a very careful 

 botanist, to whom it was submitted for examination.* 

 Olivier,^ before him, when he was on the right bank of 

 the Euphrates, to the north-west of Anah, a country 

 unfit for cultivation, " found in a kind of ravine, wheat, 

 barley, and spelt, which," he adds, " we have already seen 

 several times in Mesopotamia." 



Linnaeus says,^ that Heintzehnann found wheat in the 

 country of the Baschkirs, but no one has confirmed this 

 statement, and no modern botanist has seen the species 

 really wild in the neighbourhood of the Caucasus or 

 the north of Persia. Bunge,"^ whose attention was drawn 

 to this point, declares that he has seen no indication 

 which leads him to believe that cereals are indigenous in 

 that country. It does not even appear that wheat has a 

 tendency inthese regions to spring up accidentally outside 

 cultivated ground. I have not discovered any mention of 

 it as a wild plant in the north of India, in China, or 

 Mongolia. 



It is remarkable that wheat has been twice asserted 

 to be indigenous in Mesopotamia, at an interval of twenty- 

 three centuries, once by Berosus, and once by Olivier in 

 our own day. The Euphrates valley lying nearly in the 

 middle of the belt of cultivation which formerly extended 

 from China to the Canaries, it is infinitely probable that 

 it was the principal habitation of the species in very early 



* Strobl, in Flora, 1880, p. 348. ^ Inzenga, Annali Agric. Sicil, 



* Bull, de la 8oc. Bot. de France, 1854, p. 108. 



* J. Gay, Bull. Soc. Bot. de France, 1860, p. 30. 



* Olivier, Voy. dans VEmp. Othoman (1807), vol. iii. p. 460. 



* Linnaeus, Sp. Plant., edit. 2, vol. i. p. 127. 

 ' Bnnge, Bull. Soc. Bot. France, 1860, p. 29. 



